The Catholic Invasion of China, 1841-2000 is a subject that has undergone a great reevaluation during the last half-century. Once viewed as synonymous with Western imperialism, this incursion into China ended with the expulsion of all missionaries in 1951, but the effects persisted throughout the twentieth century. The anti-Catholic campaign of Communist persecution led to spiritual growth rather than decline, a development misread by foreign journalists and academics. From a long-term perspective the invasion contributed to the transformation of a mission church into an indigenous religion and in the process enriched Chinese culture while the Chinese church enriched Catholicism and made it more universal. The present division between the patriotic and underground Catholic churches is likely to remain unresolved until there has been some accommodation between the twin issues of the Vatican’s foreign interference in Chinese affairs and the Chinese state’s restrictions on the free practice of religion.

When four French Jesuits first encountered China in the late 1800s, they were unexpectedly swept into the turbulence of a dying empire. In this lecture, Dr. Anthony Clark, considers what it was like to be a Jesuit missionary in China as the Qing empire erupted into the violent Boxer Uprising of 1900. Living in what is today called Hebei province, these missionaries struggled to learn Chinese and adjust to Chinese culture, while also maintaining their relationships with their families back in Europe. Dr. Clark will also discuss his recent travels to where these Jesuits lived and died in 1900.

Free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Ricci Institute at 415-422-6401 or by email.

Presented by the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies. Sponsored by the EDS-Stewart Chair at the USF Ricci Institute.

This illustrated talk explores the mapping of the Qing Empire of China as an important collaborative effort in the history of science. During the course of the early modern period mapmaking changed radically. The Age of Discovery prompted Europeans to chart the globe, representing their own localities in relation to the larger world. Chinese views of their place in the world also began to shift profoundly during the early modern period. Beginning with Matteo Ricci’s World Map in Chinese (c. 1600), planispheric geometry based on measurements of latitude and longitude led Chinese scholars to see and sometimes represent their place in the world in new ways. In this talk, Laura Hostetler demonstrates that just as European maps of China relied on indigenous Chinese knowledge, Chinese maps of the empire drew on technologies and practitioners introduced from the West.

Free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Ricci Institute at 415-422-6401 or by email.

Cosponsored by California Map Society. Funded in part by the USF Jesuit Foundation.

Traduttore, Traditore: The Jesuit Construction of Science via Translation in Ming-Qing China, 1600-1800
A talk by Professor Benjamin Elman, East Asian Studies and History Department, Princeton University

When Europeans reached China during the age of exploration, they encountered different scientific explanations for natural phenomena. European scientia, represented by the specialized branches of Aristotelian moral and natural philosophy, encountered in China the naturalistic concepts of yin-yang, qi, and the classical ideal of the six arts.

This lecture will examine early modern scientific texts translated jointly by Christian missionaries and Chinese literati. These translations were not simply byproducts of the missionary enterprise, but texts encoded with Christian messages and religiously-induced silences written in classical Chinese. The focus is not on translation as a futile exercise in philosophical incommensurability, but on the use of Christian beliefs in scientific textbooks translated into Chinese.